College Baseball Composite Rankings – Feb. 24

LSU has moved atop the CollegeBaseball360.com Composite National Rankings (CNR), flipping spots with current #2 Texas, following opening-week action in the 2010 college baseball season. Current #3 Virginia and #4 Cal State Fullerton also swapped spots while UC Irvine remained #5 and four other teams (current #6 Florida St., #7 Georgia Tech, #8 Florida and #9 Arizona St.) each moved up one spot from the preseason CNR. TCU is the new team in the top-10, moving up from 11th to 10th – while Rice dropped from 6th to 17th after getting swept at Stanford.

CNR Contact: Pete LaFleur (pete@collegebaseball360.com)

The updated CNR top-50 – encompassing five national polls and a projected strength of schedule – is listed below. Please note that it appears the USA Today/ESPN coaches poll has not been updated since the preseason poll. Next week’s CNR will drop the projected strength-of-schedule factor while adding possible bonuses for preseason conference poll standing (when comparing teams in close proximity in the CNR).

Oregon (#30) and New Mexico (#31) have joined the CNR top-50, with Boston College and Jacksonville slipping out of the CNR. Stanford (#29 to #20) and Louisville (#19 to #14) made the biggest jumps in the CNR, with the biggest drops coming from (in addition to Rice): Georgia (#23 to #35), Minnesota (#33 to #43), Kansas State (#36 to #45) and Alabama (#34 to #39).

The 100-point CNR scale currently is based on five national polls – USA Today/ESPN (coaches poll), NCBWA (writers), Baseball America, Collegiate Baseball, and Rivals – and teams receive points based on their standings in each poll (60 pts for #1, 59 for #2, etc.). For polls involving voting points (coaches and CB), the CNR adjusts to reward teams that have larger margins in the voting-point totals (whereas two teams with nearly the same voting-point total will be closer in the CNR allotment for that poll).

The five CNR totals from the national polls are averaged (max. of 60) and 37 is added to each total. Finally, a projected strength-of-schedule bonus is added (max of 3 CNR pts) to produce the 100-point scale.

The CNR top-50 combines several groups of “experts” to provide a preseason projection of the 2010 NCAA Championship field (hypothetically 50 teams, plus 14 others from lower-rated automatic-bid conferences – those teams will be projected in next week’s CNR). Later in the season, other factors – such as various power rankings, NCAA-field predictions and last-10-games records – will be included in the CNR formula.

Nearly 60%of the teams (29 of 50) in the CNR top-50 come from the SEC, Big 12, ACC and pac-10, followed by two west-coast leagues: four Big West Conference teams (#4 Cal State Fullerton, #5 UC Irvine, #36 Long Beach State and #40 Cal Poly) and the West Coast Conference trio of #22 San Diego, #37 Pepperdine and #47 Gonzaga).